USB 3 Not working

[DBP]

SD cards are definitely slow compared to the good CompactFlash cards. Your results for the SD Extreme card seem quite normal. (There are a few variants of the Extreme, but that's a whole other wormhole we don't need to go down now).

The Seagate GoFlex drive is definitely a little more up-market than the Seagate Expansion (bargain basement for them). It's definitely working at the fast end (the start/outside) of the drive though. The drive in mine is a 5400 rpm, otherwise I'd be hoping to get closer to 100 MB/s.

Re your internal SSD, how long have you been using it? Eventually it may need reconditioning to bring the write speed up. Have you enabled TRIM? On most models this will also increase your write speed.

 

[NimhOfJoy]

izzysanime - I just read this thread through again and realised that you have installed a kext via Multibeast for USB3.0.
You have a Z77 Ivy Bridge chipset and matching CPU - USB 3.0 on your board is provided via the Z77 chipset and is supported natively by OS X 10.8.2. You should not be installing a kext from Multibeast for USB 3.0 - this might be why you are having problems.

I have the same motherboard as he does, have no installed the USB 3 kexts nor LaCie drivers you mentioned, and also have the same problems with my USB 3 drives as mentioned here. I was under the impression that they just don't work (yet), but should they for this motherboard (Z77-DS3H)?

 

[thierry37]

Try PXHCD 1.0.11 or other kexts. I can get >50MB/s with USB 3.0 flash drive + USB 3.0 port.

I'll dig a bit in the forum about this kext. This is my first hack and I have only been using the basic MultiBeast settings for now.
Any risks, using this alternative kext? (I don't know if I want to mess up with the stable build, so far.)

The Seagate GoFlex drive is definitely a little more up-market than the Seagate Expansion (bargain basement for them). It's definitely working at the fast end (the start/outside) of the drive though. The drive in mine is a 5400 rpm, otherwise I'd be hoping to get closer to 100 MB/s.

Ok for the SD card.
For the external Seagate drive, I can understand it would be slower than your GoFlex, but I'm just geting 29/44 compared to your 83/89 speeds. That's some kind of difference.
You really think it's just normal at this point?

Re your internal SSD, how long have you been using it? Eventually it may need reconditioning to bring the write speed up. Have you enabled TRIM? On most models this will also increase your write speed.

For the SSD, it's a new one from 15 days ago, with this new (first) build.
The TRIM is enabled, with MultiBeast, and seems ok in the System Info.
What do you mean by "need reconditioning to bring the write speed up" ?

Edit:
Reading the 2 messages below, I guess I should not complain too much, in search of the perfect USB3 config.
At least until now, my system is stable and I did not have to do any manual kext and configs...

 

[dtrvndrn]

Chiming in with yet another USB3 problem. The ports work on my Z68 mountain lion system with the multibeast driver. I get the advertised 45MB/s speed from my SanDisk SD card. But the problem is it's highly unstable. When copying large video files my system will freeze half of the time. Only thing left to do then is a hard power cycle to reboot...

 

[DBP]

For the external Seagate drive, I can understand it would be slower than your GoFlex, but I'm just geting 29/44 compared to your 83/89 speeds. That's some kind of difference.
You really think it's just normal at this point?

I just realised I had a Seagate Expansion 500 GB drive on the shelf (with ~100 GB of files on it due to be delivered to a customer, and formatted in FAT32). I unpacked it and did a quick test with Black Magic:
USB2: 28 MB/s write, 37 MB/s read
USB3: 67 MB/s write, 100 MB/s read

Your's is still a bit behind that. Just to review your test of the drive, were you able to make an HFS+ or FAT32 filesystem and run Black Magic? Is the filesystem at the front of the drive or the back of the drive? The front can be a lot faster, and although USB2 has traditionally hidden this performance difference on external drives, on USB3 it can become more obvious.

For the SSD, it's a new one from 15 days ago, with this new (first) build.
The TRIM is enabled, with MultiBeast, and seems ok in the System Info.
What do you mean by "need reconditioning to bring the write speed up" ?

Maintaining SSD drives in OS X
Reconditioning a solid state drive

In your case I suspect this is not yet an issue. It may just be the drive model. I suspect the SanDisk Extreme does slow down on incompressible data (Black Magic deliberately tried to simulate worst-case conditions). See my earlier post where I mention using `dd` to write zero data to the drive and monitor the speed with `iostat` in another window. I suspect when writing zeros it will go a LOT faster.

Of course, with all these benchmarks we are first ensuring that Spotlight, Time Machine, etc are not doing things while we test. (just trying to cover all bases)

Reading the 2 messages below, I guess I should not complain too much, in search of the perfect USB3 config.
At least until now, my system is stable and I did not have to do any manual kext and configs...

Yes, there is a lot to be said for that.

 

[thierry37]

For now, on this Seagate Expansion Drive, it's currently NTFS formatted (just 100GB used, so still in the "front" of the disk). But I could not run the BlackMagic speed test. (I can't format my wife's drive, she'd kill me. )
I was just copying manually a 1.5GB file. Maybe I would get better speed with HFS.
I will see in the future, when I buy a new external drive, with USB3.

Back to my USB3 flash drive, doing 16/47 on the USB3 port, I am using a Transcend Jetflash 700 8GB. (Maybe the 16GB and 32GB models are faster?)
Here, they tested at 12/34 MB/s (so I'm good)
Here, the 16GB is giving 42/72
Here, the 16GB is giving 21/70
I guess I'll live with it. It's still much faster than my old USB2 drives.



For the SSD, I did also some test with manual copy of a 3120 MB file from the SSD to the SSD. It's still doing an average 23s (~136 MB/s.) Similar to the 124 MB/s from Black Magic test.
Yes, Spotlight indexing, TM and other software are not running during my tests.

It's the only thing which still bother me. But you might be right again, if BlackMagic is trying the worse scenario.

I had a try to "iostat" command, with a manual copy of 3GB
It was showing 180-190 MB/s. (but it's not writing zeros, as you suggested to test.)


How should I modify the command dd bs=32k if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/USB_STICK/testfile
to run it on my SSD?
Should it be dd bs=32k if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/SSD_name/testfile ?
I tried and I get a "Permission denied"

 

[DBP]

How should I modify the command dd bs=32k if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/USB_STICK/testfile
to run it on my SSD?
Should it be dd bs=32k if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/SSD_name/testfile ?
I tried and I get a "Permission denied"

dd bs=32k count=100000 if=/dev/zero of=name_of_file

So if your current directory is your home folder and that's on the SSD, then fine. You could use ./testfile to create "testfile" in the current directory. You can use `pwd` to check where the current directory is, and `df .` to identify which volume it's on.

I suggested 100000 there as the count: multiply this by the block size and you'll see it will stop after 3276800000 bytes, which should be around the 3 GB mark. Or you can control-C before then if you're happy.
Or bs=512k count=6000, or whatever combination works for you.

 

[thierry37]

Thanks a lot for your help!
The 100 000 was a bit short. It took 6 seconds.

I got about 500MB/s in the middle of the test, from the terminal with iostat and also on the Activity Monitor.
I did not know for the "read" test, but I got 415 MB/s from Black Magic, which is correct.

So I guess I'm good with the numbers and will sleep better tonight.

Thanks again DBP!

 

[miramar]

Hi theirry,

I have the same brand of USB3 flash drive as you but in 16gb. My speeds are 20/70. The JF700 is one of the slowest USB3 flash drives around but also the cheapest.

Tested on my Zomac.

I also have a Seagate Expansion USB3.0 500GB. I'll run a test on it once I clear it up, it's almost full at the moment.

 

[thierry37]

Yes, it was the cheapest on Amazon.
But I guess for 10 euros, the 8GB, there is no reason to buy the 6€ cheap USB2 (stupid me!)

Thanks, it's always good to be able to compare.

It's my first hack, and I am always wondering: do I get as good as the real Mac, or it's limited?
Or anyway, it would also this speed on a mac mini?
etc.

I admit, it's really stupid, but I can't stop thinking.